Performance Management in Networked Situations

On March 16, 2000, Amazon.com (AMZN), one of the leading E-commerce sites on the Internet, crashed at 2:08 p.m., Pacific Coast Time. The company has one of the most technically advanced performance management system in the world, and has spent more than $400 million building and maintaining its systems.

According to the flash news release from Wired, ôThe technical problem was internal and was not a denial-of-service attack, according to Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith. From 2:08 p.m. to 3:09 p.m. PST, Amazon users were met with a message informing them that æour store is closed temporarilyÆö (Couzin, 2000, Online).

The company wouldnÆt disclose the financial details of the loss, but some analysts suggested that the outage could have cost upwards of $500,000 in missed revenues. What happened?

ôAmazon engineers didn't know what caused the crash, but weÆre working to find out. Although she acknowledged that the company is concerned about such system failures and the loss of business that inevitably accompanies them,[the spokesman] also pointed out that a site the size of Amazon is bound to hiccup now and thenö (Couzin, 2000, Online).

For many companies, problems associated with creating a comprehensive performance management system have been daunting. And in general, there are two broad categories of performance management technical problems -- Intranet and Internet. Since both of these have

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their results) and how effectively the technology achieves those results (their behaviors). Organizations attempt to manage the "what" side of the performance coin through a goal-setting or Management by Objectives process. At the beginning of a performance period employees would set goals, say a 22 percent improvement in data processing, or a reduction in down or offline time by 4 percent. Managers would be involved in the goal setting in an effort to ensure that individual goals are aligned with the organizationÆs. At the end of the performance period, the technology employees and the technologyÆs performance against the goals is evaluated. The "how" side of performance was managed by creating a competency model that specifies the behaviors expected by the organization, or the processing and connectivity speeds and accuracies that are thought to be needed by effective technology. So a performance period, therefore, has the following elements: * A goal to solve a problem * Personnel who will manage and operate the technology to solve that problem * Application of a software process, or implementation of a new hardware configuration to solve the problem. * Bounded time period of evaluation At the end of the performance peri
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Performance Management, Summary Web-based, Management Objectives, Typical Connection, Online Contexting, Internet Intranet, PST Amazon, WAN LAN, Remote MONitoring, Internet World, performance management, network performance, performance period, network performance management, 2000 online, analysis --, management *, rfc 1271, performance management *, project management, 2000 march, performance period employees, performance management system, network topology, 1998 march 9,
Approximate Word count = 2995
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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